The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 165 



plates on the one side and more formidable jaws, claws, 

 teeth and limbs on the other, their weight and size became 

 of themselves in time their owners' worst foes, sinking them 

 in morasses, stranding them on bars, exposing them to be 

 overwhelmed with sudden floods, and at last bearing them 

 down to earth and to extinction by simply their own huge- 

 ness. On the other hand, with some disadvantages, the de- 

 velopment of the animal's inner powers and parts had, in 

 all these directions, a corresponding gain. When Nature 

 invented her backbone, and put her limbs, flesh, senses, and 

 so many of her soft and vulnerable parts, on its outside, it 

 looked at first like a great military mistake, like the 

 building of a fort and the putting of its garrison outside 

 of its walls rather than within their protection. But what 

 a tremendous part this very arrangement of it has acted 

 in all her subsequent operations. The mineral matter its 

 possessors needed to carry about was, in proportion to their 

 size, greatly reduced by it, alike in weight and bulk. How 

 flexible it has proved in the line of adaptations, ranging 

 all the way from the fish in the sea to the bird in the air, 

 from the snake that crawls to the man that walks, and 

 from the uses of war to the needs of peace. What beauty 

 and dignity it has gathered around it in man's kingly 

 stature and in Avoman's queenly grace ; and how fitly, in 

 the higher conflicts of civilization, it has become the symbol 

 of the statesman's crowning attribvite, his " having back- 

 bone." So with each of Nature's other steps in the same 

 direction. What was the sharp tooth as a help, either in 

 defense or attack, as compared with the sharp eye ? What 

 the huge limb, clumsily brought down on its object, in con- 

 trast with the quickened nerve which, in the same time, with 

 a smaller limb, could rain a score of blows against the 

 selected weak parts of its victim ? What the chance of 

 the creature with the strongest claw and the widest range 

 of wood and sea, in its contest with hunger and cold, as 

 measured against one with the hand and mind to weave 

 every fibre that grows into robes of warmtli, turn every 

 force of Nature into weapons of war, and lay every land 

 that blooms under contribution for food ? If the inner de- 

 velopment lost sometimes in its direct fitness for fighting, 

 it made up for it a tliousand fold by its larger fitness for 

 peace ; and as peace, even in the wildest nature, is at least 

 one of its normal conditions, is the time, even among 



